


Hope in a Tear

by lferion



Category: King and Lionheart - Of Monsters and Men (Music Video)
Genre: Gen, Siblings, Yuletide, Yuletide 2013, kingship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lionhearts were rare, as rare as Kings. The tears of both rarer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope in a Tear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strix_alba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/gifts).



> Immeasurable thanks to the usual suspects for encouragement, sanity-checking and virtual chocolate.

* * *

Jhaerth's tear fell through the smoke, the dust and ash, through the shifts of stone as the skyship rose. Red ribbons wove themselves among the golden glitter of the Lionheart that motivated the ship, threaded around pale strands, forming the beginnings of sovereign-locks, mourning braids, the twists and bindings marking his transition from prince-potential to prince-actual, sovereign-in-truth. 

He didn't want it. Jhaerethe was (was, still was, was still) prince-heir, her hair properly long, properly heavy with the marks of her accomplishments, symbols of her position, learning and duty. Her Lionheart should be driving her skyship upward alongside his. She should be taking on the sovereignty she was ready for, that he was only just beginning to learn. 

But. She had not (yet. She would. She _would_ ) reached the skyships. Prince-heirs were not meant to be singular, solitary. Interregnum was anathema to everything they were. Everything that held the worlds together. 

The King was dead. Long live the King.

Alone.

No.

* * *

The King [was/were] dying. They had been long ill; whether cause or consequence of the increasingly bold bandits, the rise of Dark-beasts, the fell and poisoned land, the grey air, or something yet other could not be said. The skyships roused at the approaching change, rose up from the caverns where they slept in still readiness. The prince-heirs — apparent and potential both — were fetched from lesson and practice, from duty and study within warded but not isolated walls to take up the strands of power from failing hands. 

Both would be needed. Robed in red, Jhaerethe prince-apparent and Jhaerth prince-potential stood at the side of the blue-draped dais, hands gripping one to the other, as first one and then the other of the gaunt figures swathed in glimmering pale light stilled, radiance dimming, fading to nothing, and then going out with a sigh.. But even as both were breathing their last, their Lionhearts leaving them only with that final breath, the room erupted into violence as a mob of shadow-men appeared, rushing in from every archway, every dark corner. Servitors fled or were cut down by blades that ate light. 

Rough hands snatched up the heirs, bundled them under thick arms unyielding as the black iron weapons they brandished. In moments the invaders were thundering down deserted hallways, Jhaerth and Jhaerethe struggling fruitlessly to escape their captors, to where great engines of destruction stood in the rubble of what had once been garden and palace walls. The largest engine was a enormous two-headed thing, a Dark-beast on one end, a ravenor on the other, and the metal plates burned underfoot as they were carried up and dropped unceremoniously to the deck.

"Keep them separate," barked the biggest of the men. He shoved Jhaerth at one of the reivers, "Take the boy. I warrant the High Council of Kings will pay very well for their princelings." Metal clanged, and Jhaerth found himself shoved into a cage of wire that bit cold where it touched. "I'll see to the girl."

It took several of the bandits to get the shackle on Jhaerethe's wrist. She fought with fury, but hand-to-hand fighting was nothing she knew, nothing any prince studied. When the deck of the engine split, what had seemed a whole revealed as two, the halves separating, the spiked wheels turning in opposite directions, it was as if the world itself was splitting. Jhaerethe and Jhaerth had never been taken from each other before, never riven apart, brother torn from sister, iron severing their spirits from one into two.

* * *

Jhaerth's tear fell through grey air, bright and heavy. With it flew-fell-spun a spark of liquid light. A Lionheart tear.

Lionhearts were rare, as rare as Kings. The tears of both rarer. That rarity gathered the weight of the wind, the fire-blue edges of night, the silence of the mountain spirits trapped in ice, the green-black depths of storm-chained sea, red-gold shards of fallen starlight, the intangible, fragile dreams of shattered, once-proud builded stones.

* * *

The bonds and bounds of law were loosed at the passing of Kings, reformed and sealed with the ascension of the princes to sovereignty. This world had killed the old, captured and divided the new. The very cords that held the land and sea and sky together were undone, all order overset. Bandit lord and reiver-chief had worked for that very outcome, that they might profit in chaos.

They would have their wish. Without the King, there would be chaos. Profit would be another matter entirely. Already the men were fighting among themselves. What alliance or agreement would hold, when the substance of the world was unravelling, roots gnawed by ever-hungry Dark?

* * *

Jhaerethe ran toward the skyships, hearing the harsh clatter of the armor and weapons of the men chasing her, feeling the faint burning-acid touch of the outer wisps of the deadly breath of the Dark-beast curl ineffectually away from her skin. The Lionheart burned behind her like a glede, stopping the beast with its very substance. Light sacrificed itself to halt the ravening Dark.

Not in vain. She would not let it be in vain. The path to the skyships lay open and straight before her. She ran, feet remembering the buoyant sparkle and firmness of the light-bridge the Lionheart had made over the chasm, hands holding to the memory of the rope that had lifted her out of the dank pit. The moment it had greeted her, feathery gold warmth brushing her cheek, she had known it for a Lionheart manifest, a sight out of legend. She had known too that its companion-twin-otherself was rescuing Jhaerth, that he would be free and well-aided in escape. The connection between them sang again, frayed and slender but once more whole.

The ground trembled. The spindly, sickly trees seemed to bend lower, out of her way. Smoke and dust boiled up in the valley as she reached the crest of the hill, and white-gold light lanced up from the spire of the central skyship. Her brother had reached safety, was even now rising up, leaving the world. 

Without the bindings of sovereignty to hold the fabric of the world together, without a Lionheart, no skyship would open to her, fly her up and away. 

Jhaerth would be King, then. King-alone. But she would not stop running, not stop reaching for everything she loved, everything she had worked for. Did the world end, she would yet strive to do and be. Chaos and destruction would not win.

* * *

The tear fell-flew not down now, but out, a star-bright light, expanding in a glorious, furious rush. The edge of it washed over Jhaerethe like foam, cool and familiar-fierce — sister-known-loved-needed — giving speed to her feet and hope to her heart. She kept running forward, not looking back.

The Dark-beast howled when the light touched it, shredding into tatters of ash and oily vapor. The machine it rode ground to a halt with a shriek of tearing metal and the men stumbled, dazzled and frightened. Motes of gold began to emerge from the roil of smoke, coalescing around the spark of the tear, and just as Jhaerethe would have stepped off into nothingness, it caught her up, a shimmer of will and love and Lionheart. 

Jhaerth's skyship stopped its ascent, hovering as a beam of light drew Jhaerethe and the Lionheart to safety within. By the time she was reunited with her brother, red ribbons had woven themselves through her hair in a new pattern, a new possibility.

* * *


End file.
